This particular tweet has been making the rounds here.
I am no medical professional. But a couple of things seem off.
i) A+ is one of the most common blood types right?
ii) 70(!) bottles. I thought the average woman has only 4-5 litres of blood, total.
What am I missing?
Yes, A+ is very common. How common will change with ethnic group and therefore by location but it’s not rare at all. Blood isn’t measured in “bottles” (which size bottle, anyway? 5mL, 2L?); not even in “bags”, which is the actual type of container used. And while someone may need not whole blood but a specific extract which requires more than one liter to make one dose, several of those are actually blood-group independant.
I don’t know if it’s a scam or a honest series of mistakes, but it’s definitely not the kind of thing you usually see from actual blood banks and hospitals.
I have seen extra donations requested from established donors that are geographically close to a specific patient before*, but I’d be surprised if calling that number didn’t lead to a suggestion to donate cash, instead.
*it can be useful to keep the number of donors to a minimum in some cases.
Approximately 1/3 of the population overall has type A+.
The “plasma transplant” wording is suspicious. I guess she means plasma exchange (or plasmapheresis). In any case, blood type does not matter if we’re talking plasma.
mmm
If plasma exchange/plasmapheresis is planned, then yes, the plasma product (i.e. FFP, or fresh frozen plasma) should be ABO compatible, to avoid hemolysis of red blood cells in the recipient due to antibodies in the plasma.
I don’t know if plasma comes in bottles in Lahore. Maybe there’s a language problem here.
Looks like the message was written by the family of the patient, and the poster wasn’t comfortable changing it.
I don’t know how to tell if that is a scam, but here is a book excerpt about how blood donation works in India and some of the challenges they face.
Some anecdotes are a bit disturbing, but nothing more graphic than you would read in a newspaper.
If you Google Dr. Humma Saeef, she seems to be passionate about a lot of things. I can’t tell what she’s a doctor of, but it doesn’t look like medicine.